


Horrificator

by toastycatty



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, F/M, Horror, short film script
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29161242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toastycatty/pseuds/toastycatty
Summary: The Fracoise Dupont class wanted to make a short horror film, and things happened. I went project Blairwitch with an akuma and all! This  is my take on what that short film could've been; it got contaminated with the akuma in  question, and for some reason, I thought it was in space. My bad. When  I rewatched the episode I realised that WAS NOT the case, but I was already invested in the concept. I drew a bunch od character sheets, comics and animatics for this story, which you can  find in  my IG @miraculous.lady.drawing , in the horrificatorAU hashtag or in my horrificator AU guide. I hope you like it! This is the first time I share my very own fanfic!
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Kudos: 2





	Horrificator

I-

I try to get a grip, there’s a dire need to do so. I focus on my surroundings instead:

Three things I can hear... there’s the buzzing of appliances, always humming; there is our muffled panting, so loud inside my head; there is the chirping of sparks and short circuits. I take a deep breath. 

Three things I can touch.... There’s the railing I’m holding on, hard and cold; there’s the sweat-drenched shirt sticking to my chest; there is the throbbing of my arm. I breathe out.

Three things I can smell... There's the thick coat of antiseptic as usual, but also it smells like burnt plastic, and blood.

I open my eyes: Three things I can see: Lights are flickering, equipment is floating by, my flight engineer.

“Commander Cheng!” Agreste says, as he squishes my good shoulder. “Hey, you’re zoning out. Please, don’t melt down on me right now,” his voice isn’t as steady in that last part, and that, at last, gets to me, managing to interrupt my wrecked train of thought.

“Don’t worry, Agreste,” reply with bravado. “I’m not bailing. We’re doing this together.”

“It’s you and me against the world,” he says as he offers his hand. I grab it tightly, holding on to it as if my life depended on it. It may, as far as we know.

In that moment, lights die out. We need to move fast.

  
  
  


II- 

It was the lights that did it. You see, there is no such thing as day or night when you’re on a spaceship, but there’s a schedule, a sense of normalcy that takes you from one task to the next, and there are always artificial lights on. When I woke up, I knew normalcy had been disrupted. Something was way off. For starters, Rose wasn’t sleeping in her station next to mine. Also, a water bottle must have emptied, because big blobs of liquid were floating aimlessly. And then, of course, lights were flickering nauseatingly. 

I rummaged around my station to put on my boots and find a toolkit . “What should I do?” I decided to get hold of Max, to see if he was already working on the problem, and if he needed assistance. Maybe contact Operations Base after that, to see what information they could provide. There was always either Alya or Nino monitoring our systems, 24/7, so they should have some useful information to get us out of this fix. I felt my way out of my sleep station and towards the opposite side of the module. The communications panel was dead. Something was way off.

If I had hoped the next module would be any better, I was sorely disappointed. No, that wasn’t it. The botanic lab was in total disarray. Alert signals were flashing red, and under that light, I could see suspended blobs floating by.

I propelled myself towards the panel to enter the security codes. My fingers got wet and sticky. The metallic smell. Blood. I was actually terrified.

That’s when I saw it. It caught the light in a weird way, refracting it like a liquid. In a corner of the lab there was this orb. And inside it, there was... something. I pushed to get closer and have a look. As I was getting closer, I could see a second orb around the corner. They were bigger than I originally thought, and definitely they didn’t match up with anything in the inventory, as far as I knew. And then I was grabbed.

  


I struggled silently, as my mouth was firmly covered. 

“Shhhh, it’s me, Cheng, it’s Officer Agreste. It’s me, Adrien!. Please, Mari, stay still and quiet, we’re both in danger,” the eager murmur in my ear sounded a lot like my crewmate, so I relented, and he pulled me into a nook under the board.

“Whatever are you doing...?” I started whisper-screaming, but he covered my mouth again and directed my attention to the right with a side glance.

Max was unconscious. He was being carried. The one carrying Max looked a lot like Mylene, but bigger. Much bigger. She started drooling over him, encasing him in goo. 

“Those orbs..,” I tried to articulate, my face pressed against Jones’s shoulder.

“This is our chance to go,” he interrupted.

I nodded, and he pointed towards the door of the next module. We made our way as fast as we could.

III- So back we were in my sleep station. 

“Those orbs...” I started again, but I couldn’t find the words to follow.

“Those must have been Rose and Juleka, inside them,” Jones confirmed.

“What is Mylene doing? Has she gone berserk?” I simply couldn’t phantom how the sweet little pet of a bio-engineering experiment could’ve turned against its handlers.

“She’s programmed to aid biosecurity in space, identifying and handling threats to humans... but she’s still highly experimental. She might have... I don’t know, got mixed up, and turned against Rose, Juleka and Max.”

“We must neutralise her and rescue our crewmates as soon as possible.”

“But, why are there malfunctions? Gravity is down, lights are unreliable, who knows what else? We need to get to the main module and reboot the systems!”

“Could Mylene have sabotaged them?”

“We need to get hold of Operations Base, or at least get footage of the Botanical lab.”

So we headed in the opposite direction, towards the living-room, as we call it. It’s a very small facility where we eat, and spend our leisure time. We sealed the compartment behind us. This module looked normal, there even was gravity. Agreste headed towards the opposite side to check the main panel. I headed towards the communications panel, to try and contact, not Max, but Operations Base. 

As soon as I entered my code, lights dimmed into emergency mode. And code red started flashing.

I acted on reflex this time, I sprinted and pushed Agreste into the next compartment. We crash-landed on my shoulder, which instantly felt all wrong. I slammed open the panel to my right and put on the oxygen mask. Then, gravity failed yet again but, more importantly, also did the air system: that was code red.

I sealed this compartments door too, unsure now what I was supposed to be fending off. Then, I grabbed Agreste and pressed a second oxygen mask onto his face. He started coughing, to my relief. And then panic came crashing down on me, I didn't know what to do anymore.

  
  


IV- 

Lights have died down for real, and it’s urgent to act fast. We suit up, as the air system isn’t reliable anymore. I don’t want to think about whether the rest of the crew can breathe or not, given their current orb-encasing, courtesy of Mylene. 

The plan is simple. We walk the hull towards the main module, outmaneuvering Mylene, and fix the malfunctions. I hope. Max is the IT guy, but we will have to make do. Agreste being the Maths/Physics guy, and me being the Pilot/Logistics guy, we may manage to patch it up, we have a compatible skillset with the task at hand.

“Have you walked the hull before?” Agreste asks.

“I’ve done my bit of solar panel maintenance. What about you?”

“Do simulations count?”

“Don’t worry, Adrien,” I say a few seconds too late. “Your senior crewmember is here to look out for you.”

We fasten our security harnesses and open the valve. We are floating in the vacuum of space now, and that never feels particularly nice.

“Let’s just keep on talking, OK?” I say, recalling what my senior crew member told me when I had my first hull walk. I double check our harnesses and we walk out of the ship.

“I always imagined our time alone together would be more romantic than this,” Adrien says.

“Hey, what do you mean? We are taking a stroll under the stars!”

“Yes, but your mind is elsewhere, I can tell m’lady.”

“You need to up you game, loverboy, if you want my undivided attention.” I never knew why we were always low-key flirting. But whatever keeps our minds away from the void of space.

“So, will you go on a date with me, when we get off duty?”

_ Ok, not whatever. Is this dude serious? _ “Let’s...Let us focus on the task at hand, OK?” 

“You break my heart, love.”

“It’s Commander to you.”

“Commander Cold-hearted, you make my heart melt even at zero Kelvin.” 

It takes us some more minutes to reach the bay, the compartment closest to the main module. This part of the ship is in no better shape than the others, but there is no tell-tale goo to point to Mylene's presence. 

When you are navigating a ship with no gravity, it’s of the utmost importance to get a hold of something. If there’s nothing for you to push, or pull, you stay where you are. You are a sitting duck. And there is no such thing as space swimming. So when we see Mylene creeping our way on the same wall we are crawling, it seems a good idea at first to hold each other and push away from the wall. Problem is, the bay is big, and Mylene jumps in our direction, and there is no way we move away. She’ll get us.

Officer Adrien Agrest, resident Math/Physics genius, does then something very stupid. He pushes me towards the main module. 

“Go reboot the systems, Mari, I’ll get Mylene off your back!” he says. So the dork starts screaming and wriggling to get Mylene’s attention, and I float powerlessly until I crash into the main module door. As I get hold of the handle and turn back, I see my partner being encased in goo. 

I turn around swiftly and try to focus. The task at hand.

V- 

“Marcov!” I shout. “Marcov! It’s Commander Marinette Dupain-Cheng, ID code 19745XI-2.”

“ID confirmed. Welcome, Marinette,” says the electronic voice of the ship’s AI.

“Marcov, reboot support systems!”

“Error. I cannot do that, Commander Cheng.”

I feel I can cry, so I shout instead, “Are your brains addled with goo too? What has Mylene done?!”

“Incorrect. There is no goo on me. But I have been infected by a virus. Support systems have been compromised. I cannot reboot.”

“Marcov, show me the footage of the Botanic Lab today.”

The clip starts playing. At first, there is nothing to see.

“Marcov, fast forward.” And there enters Juleka, and she starts working in a flurry of fast forward activity. Then there’s red. “Stop! Now play it at normal speed.”

The footage shows how the code red starts flashing, but Juleka is too far from the console, and faints before reaching the oxygen masks. She hits her head hard against a panel. And then, Mylene jumps into action. She grows bigger, breaks her silicon cage, and propels towards her limp handler. She starts pouring goo on Juleka’s face, who then starts coughing. 

I gasp, “Did Mylene... save her?

“Mylene seems to have used her capacities to give life support to the human crew.”

“Marcov, what are the crew members’ readings? Are they breathing? How’s brain activity?”

“Their vitals are normal, but there is reduced brain activity,” the AI replies.

“Is it an induced coma?”  _ There is no time to lose. _

“Marcov, for how long can the ship support us at the current rate?”

“Two days.”

“Marcov, contact Operations Base.”

After some minutes of blank screen, Alya appears in front of me. 

“Girl, we’ve lost contact with your ship 4hs ago, what’s the matter?” Alya blurts immediately.

“Marcov has been infected by a virus and support systems are failing. The rest of the crew has been put under an induced coma by Mylene. I’ve got two days before...”

“Oh my gosh, I’m already working on it.”

After some time, Alya says, “I’ve got a solution for it, but you won’t like it.”

“Try me,” I answer. 

“You need to set a course to these coordinates. It’s halfway between you and the nearest ship. They’ll be able to assist you.”

“The problem is...” I enquire.

“The problem is that, at full thrust, you’ll get there in five days,” Alya says.

“Can you fix the virus?”

“We can try, but there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed, or that we’ll succeed in time. The crew’s lives are at stake.”

“We are doomed,” I wail. I feel hot tears trickling down my face.

“You are not, girl,” Alya says, “but you need to embrace the goo.”

I feed Marcov the coordinates and make contact with the Majestia crew. And then there is only one thing left to do. I exit the main module, and there she is.

“Hello, Mylene. It’s goo to see you,” I chuckle.

\--------------------------

Character Sheets

**Author's Note:**

> Some ideas that weren't included:  
> Of course the virus is Hawkmoth's akuma. He's some sort of space pirate/hacker terrorist with obscure intent just making the kids' and the whole multiverse's lives harder.
> 
> I don't know how/if I can include the animatics here, so, if flickering lights don't give you a seizure, you can fin them on my insta. Thanks for stopping by! Constructive criticism is enormously appreciated!


End file.
